Sunday, January 5, 2014

Living in a Radiation Contaminated Zone

Can you see the yellowish emissions coming up from unit 2?I am working on an edited book promoting a new energy paradigm for Japan and the world with a number of collaborators.I am writing the chapter exploring how nuclear energy dispossesses citizens of their democratic rights by destroying personal property, democracy, and the pursuit of happiness. One section in my chapter is called 'Living in a Radiation Contaminated Zone.' Here is an (incomplete) excerpt from that section. Please feel free to suggest additional ideas and sources.

The
Fukushima disaster demonstrates that nuclear power dispossesses citizens of
their property, security and individual well-being. Liberal democratic
capitalism may also join the casualties of nuclear power. Japan’s new national
security legislation has been described as ‘fascistic’ for enabling censorship
and criminalizing whistleblowing. Some within Japan have observed that this law
would allow the national government to censor radiation municipal radiation
reading because of the threat to national security that they might pose. The
pressing question concerns the form of national security at stake because a nation
that seeks security in hiding the radiological contamination of their citizens
hardly seems ‘secure.’ One has to wonder what
is secured by denying the destruction of the Japanese genome?

Nuclear
power produces many externalities that are fundamentally incongruous with
liberal democracy. The OECD defines environmental externalities as
“uncompensated environmental effects of production and consumption that affect
consumer utility and enterprise cost outside the market mechanism.”[i]
Environmental externalities distort market pricing and force impacted
bystanders to absorb costs. This chapter considers this argument by documenting
externalities of the Fukushima disaster while discussing their implications for
individual rights, the commons, and democracy. Those committed to market
capitalism may also note that direct nuclear subsidies and environmental
externalities are fundamentally market distorting. Nuclear is antithetical to
free market energy operations.

LIVING IN A RADIATION
CONTAMINATED ZONE

The disease processes
caused by radiation bio-accumulation are complex because radiation both causes,
and increases susceptibility to, disease by suppressing the immune system and accelerating
aging processes. Radiation produces micro level damage by severing DNA strands
and it causes formation of free radicals. For instance, the energy lost by beta
particles – accelerated electrons – as they pass through cells disrupts
chemical bonds and promotes unstable and chemically reactive atoms, called
radicals.[ii] Damaged
DNA and the increase in free radicals result in genomic instability, even among
cells escaping direct hits by the beta particle or any other form of ionizing
radiation. Genomic instability leads to increased error in cell production.
Error compromises the body’s biological repair mechanisms and immunological defences.
Research suggests that mitochondrial DNA are particularly susceptible to damage
from ionizing radiation[iii] and
that ionizing radiation adversely alters the highly radiosensitive T-cell
system, which is vital to the immune response. Japanese research on the
immunological health of atomic bomb survivors concluded that “radiation on
T-cell immunity resemble effects of aging on the immune system.”[iv]

Radiation
ages the body, produces inflammation, and perhaps most significantly, compromises
reproductive health through the transgenerational transmission of mutations. For
example, a 2002 study found that excess radiation exposure accelerates point
mutations that are transmitted across generations, even among people accustomed
to higher than average background radiation.[v] Another
study found intergenerational effects from radiation exposure, including
“increased instability of repeat-DNA sequences” in descendants of affected
individuals, due in part to increased ‘mutational mosaicism’ of the germ line
(Dubrova, Plumb, Guiterrez, Bolton, & Jeffreys, 2000, p. 37). These studies
substantiate geneticists warning in the 1956 BEAR report that any additional
exposure to radiation increases genetic mutations, which are heritable in
germ-line cells. They warned then that human health and reproduction are at
risk from the transgenerational accumulation of mutations caused by exposure to
nuclear fallout from atmospheric testing.

The Soviets encapsulated
ionizing radiation’s complex deconstructive processes in the disease syndrome
known as Chronic Radiation Syndrome. This syndrome destroys health and
well-being, as illustrated by Kate Brown’s Plutopia:
Nuclear Families, Atomic Cities, and the Great Soviet and American Plutonium
Disasters, which describes the affliction of chronic radiation syndrome in
the people of a village of Muslumovo, located in the southern Russian Ural
Mountains. The village is located downstream the Maiak plutonium plant, which
manufactured plutonium-based bomb cores beginning in 1948. The plant used the
Techa River to dispose of high level radioactive waste. The numerous villages
along the river were not informed, despite using its water for drinking,
cooking, and bathing. Some of the villages along the contaminated river were
eventually evacuated, but not Muslumovo. In the early 1990s a pediatric doctor
working in the village, Glufarida
Galimova, was puzzled by and began investigating the high incident of strange
disorders, including hydrocephalic children, children with cerebral palsy,
missing kidneys, extra fingers, anemia, fatigue, and weak immune system.
Galimova found that more than half of the children suffered pathologies. By
1999, 95 percent of children born in the village suffered from genetic
disorders while 90 percent of the entire childhood population experienced
chronic anemia, fatigue and/or immune disorders. After examining medical
records, Galimova concluded that only seven percent of adults in the city could
be considered healthy.

Galimova was not the only doctor observing
irregularities. By 1962, the Cheliabinsk branch of the Soviet Institute of
Bio-Physics, called FIB-4, had begun systematic study of the health of the
Muslumovo population. When Galimova inquired about the cause of the birth
defects documented by FIB-4 she was told the culprits was alcohol, although the
FIB-4 group had diagnosed 935 people on the Techa River with Chronic Radiation
Syndrome, a new disorder labeled in 1950 by a doctor at the plutonium plant.
Early symptoms of the disorder included headaches, sharp pains in bones and
joints, and chronic fatigue. Blood changes, including severe anemia, typically
followed these symptoms. Longer term symptoms included heart disease and
markedly slowed gait.

Alexey V. Nesterenko, Vassily B. Nesterenko, and
Alexey V. Yablokov observe in their Introduction to Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the
Environment that former UN Secretary-General Kofi Annan calculated that at
least 7,000,000 people were adversely impacted by that disaster.[vi]
Their review of 5,000 medical and scientific studies concluded there were 985,000
deaths from Chernobyl between 1986 and 2004, primarily from cancer, heart and
other circulatory diseases, and excess infant mortality. Perhaps most troubling
of all, they argue only 20 percent of children living in the Chernobyl
contaminated areas of Belarus, Ukraine, and European Russia are considered
healthy.[vii] Research
from the region suggests Chernobyl radiation bio-accumulated in children’s
bodies and affected their genomic stability. Yuri Bandazhevsky found that
children contaminated with Cesium-137 producing 50 disintegrations per second
(becquerels) per kilogram of body weight suffered irreversible heart damage.[viii]
Anna Aghajanyan and Igor Suskov found that male Chernobyl liquidators and their
children had increased aberrant genome frequencies, suggesting
transgenerational genomic instability as a consequence of radiation exposure.[ix] A
2008 review of findings on genomic damage in children published in Mutation Research concluded that
Chernobyl-radiation exposed children suffered consistently increased chromosome
aberration and micronuclei frequency.[x] Another
study found that that chronic low-dose exposure to
radiation from Chernobyl caused increased rates of neural tube-defects and
conjoined twins.

Biological effects on health and reproduction
from Chernobyl falloutoccurred widely.[xi]
Almond, Edlund and Palme found cognitive effects, particularly retardation
among Swedish children exposed in utero to Chernobyl fallout at 8 to 25 weeks
of gestation.[xii]The critical period for neuorogenesis roughly
corresponds to this time period. Another study documented post-Chernobyl mortality increases in infants in Germany[xiii]
and also in the elderly and auto-immune compromised in the U.S.[xiv]Nowakowski
and Hayes (2008) explore the myriad effects of radiation on early brain
development (i.e., neurogenesis), which include double-strand breaks of DNA
impacting cell proliferation and migration during critical periods of early
brain development. They conclude that early fetal development is particularly
susceptible to effects of relatively low levels of exposure to radioisotopes
from nuclear accidents, among other sources of exposure.

Fallout adversely
affects the entire eco-system. Dr. Dave DeSante, from the Institute on Bird
Populations in California, found newborn bird mortality averaged 65 percent and
100 percent for species whose young fed on the new-growth consuming insects in
central California coastal regions.[xv] DeSante’s findings are
consistent with a
recent meta-review of studies by Anders Moller and Timouthy Mousseau on the
effects of increased ‘background radiation’ from Chernobyl, which found
‘significant negative effects on immunology, mutation and disease frequency’
across affected animal species, although radiation susceptibilities varied.[xvi]
Moreover, Moller and Mousseau found species decline and
mutations in plants and animals in the Chernobyl region amplified across time.[xvii] They explain in a
separate 2013 study that the “long-term
effects of mutation accumulation are more important determinants” of
population size and variety than short-term effects from radiotoxicity (my
italics).[xviii]

Animals and people living in radiation contaminated zones
risk premature aging, compromised immune responses, cancer, and declining reproductive
health. The epidemiological findings have been substantiated by research on
health effects from radiation exposure. For example, findings on premature
aging and genetic disorders among people in contaminated zones are consistent
with a general pattern of premature aging found in adult survivors of childhood
cancer. A 2013 study published in The
Journal of Clinical Oncology reported that survivors of cancer treated by
radiation and chemotherapy experienced significant premature aging, manifested
in symptoms such as frailty, slowed gait, low muscle mass, and weakness.[xix]
Radiation therapy, chemotherapy and the cancer disease process are all
implicated in causing the range of symptoms, although respective influences
have yet to be differentiated. However, the study did specifically note that
children who had acute lymphoblastic leukemia who were treated with high doses
of radiation to the brain showed signs as adults of brain changes and memory
problems compared to adults in their age group. It is noteworthy that the
symptoms associated with Chronic Radiation Syndrome by the Soviets, are
essentially identical with the symptoms of accelerated aging found in adult
childhood cancer survivors, including delayed gait, frailty, chronic fatigue,
and cognitive decline.

[v]S.
Lutz-Bonengel, B. Brinkmann, L. Forster, P. Forster and H. Willkomm (2002) ‘Natural
Radioactivity and Human Mitochondrial DNA Mutations’, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of
America, 99.21, http://www.pnas.

3 comments:

This is very valuable information. What we have I believe is a social situation. Human beings are rarely as ethical as we would like to imagine; and given the opportunity to experiment and see what will happen, they create situations that get out of control. Nuclear discoveries quickly became a nuclear bomb and nuclear power plants . . . and now we have a terrible situation which is irremediable. The same thing has happened in the medical area. Psychiatric medication for example. If we had been able to follow the advise of E.F. Schumacher and stay at the level of intermediary technology we would all be happier and healthier. But we have this urge to create progress. We may well have progressed ourselves as species beyond survival now. The information in your chapter is important as I have not yet seen it anywhere and did not know about the transgenerational effects. But of course it makes perfect sense. As far as I can see there is no stopping what one expert called technological solutionism, An agent similar to agent orange has just been released for use in the USA. At least it contains some of the same ingredients. That will please the investors even if it sickens and kills people in rural areas. Our lust for money and progress is nearing its end as are we!

The immune system deals with tumor cells by creating inflammatory cytokines to kill the cells, which cause autoimmune symptoms, and diseases such as atherosclerosis. But the same inflammation process kills stem cells, which are replaced by damaged and mutated daughter stem cells, which cause more tumor cells to be produced. The inflammatory process and the cancer process are two parts of the same thing.

I had not heard of a stem cell connection before.Of course, biology is not my forte.That makes total sense though!

Thank you, majia and Bobby1, for teaching me, and other readers, something new today!

Is (uncontaminated) turmeric one possible anti-inflamatory capable of preserving stem cells?Also, will it or other natural herbs (etc) help preserve remaining mitochondria?

(is a yellow emission an indication of iodine &/or sulfur or the light from a sodium lamp(s)? Noting the intense light in front seems unlike sodium lamp(s)Perhaps TEmPCO just returned from Colorado "research" on improving morale. :))

Friendly advice for Japan concerning energy production:

Follow the example of Germany.Liberate your nation.Shut them all down permanently.

About Me

I am a Professor at a large public university. I study political economy and biopolitics (the politics of life). My interests are diverse but are broadly concerned with economic, social and environmental justice. I have published 5 books: Crisis Communication, Liberal Democracy and Ecological Sustainability: The Threat of Financial and Energy Complexes in the Twenty-First Century (2016); Fukusima and the Privatization of Risk (2013); Constructing Autism (2005); Governmentality, Biopower and Everyday Life (2008/2011); Governing Childhood (2010).
I also participated in an edited collection on Fukushima: Fukushima: Dispossession or Denuclearization (2014).